Permission to Speak Out

 Leadership, Teams  No Responses »
Jul 212011
 

One of the dangers of being a natural collaborator in an official position of leadership, is that sometimes you can  forget that your team members still view you as an authority figure. You might think that you are approachable and that people feel free to disagree with you, while your team members do not forget that you call the shots and might treat you with deference.

I recently ran a team-away session, where I was working closely with the team leader. During the afternoon session, we were all sitting around the table and the team leader was briefing the team on some updates. The team leader came to one of the agenda points and after he finished his update, he asked “Are there any questions?”. The team was silent. “Ok,” he said and proceeded to continue. Having felt that it might just take a little bit longer for people to decide to speak up, I interrupted and asked two more times if anyone had anything to say before we moved on. After the first person spoke out, the rest of the team members joined in and a half an hour discussion followed.What was interesting to me, is that I knew this team leader to be a very open, collaborative, ready-to-be-challenged kind of person – and maybe it was this which made him often forget that, in the end, he was still viewed as “the boss”.

The reason why I have come back to this story is because I have just read Ron Ashkenas’ post on the HBR Blog, ‘The Dangers of Deference’. He starts his post with what I consider a scary story. In an executive leadership team meeting, the CEO of a global company began the session summarising the company’s strategy by showing some slides. This was followed by “You’ve all seen these charts before, so we don’t have to dwell on them.” He then continued with the meeting, even though none of the executives had actually seen the slides. And here comes the scary bit: nobody actually spoke out. Nobody felt like they could stick their hand up and say “Sorry, I haven’t seen these before.”

Ashkenas goes on to point out that, if the senior executives were behaving in this way, they probably expected their own reports to behave in a similar fashion, creating a culture where communication is always hindered by the hierarchical cloud upon it. Some team members will need extra confidence to contradict a person in authority, no matter how approachable they are. It is therefore important that if we hold such a position, that we  go out of our way to encourage the necessary challenges and contradictions that will make our team as strong as possible. Otherwise, we might miss out on some very valuable contributions and be in danger of our team members becoming comfortable with just saying “yes” and not thinking for themselves.

(To read more on “The Dangers of Deference”, visit the HBR Blog.)

(For an example on how to create a culture of visible accountability, where people are not afraid to speak out, read the UC post “Fomenting Transparency”.)

Opening the Door to Ambiguity

 Leadership, Teams  No Responses »
Jul 132011
 

I read an anecdote today about Churchill that made me smile.

While checking a classified document during World War II that his typist had laid out for him, Winston Churchill wrote: “Watch the borders”, referring to the fact that the typist had left little room at the edges of the paper for him to make his comments. These documents were then read by generals from the Allied troops who thought the note was meant for them, asking them to literally watch England’s borders in order to prevent an invasion.

This is an anecdote told by Thomas J. DeLong in his article The Right to Straight Talk in the Harvard Business Review. Not only does it remind me of how many English words have more than one meaning but it also made me think back to some workshops I have been running on Team Leading and Communication.

These workshops have been designed to introduce under 18s to the world of work and in particular, to the world of management. One of the sections of this workshop is on Communication, including the need to check that instructions and information have been understood correctly. It all seems very simple when you go through the models, so simple that a lot of the time the students have trouble as they think they are missing something. No, they have understood the models correctly – what they are missing is the life experience to realise that not everyone bothers to ask for clarification and indeed, sometimes this is not easy.

In a similar way to when we have “difficult conversations” (click here for relevant blog post), asking for clarification can also make us feel like we appear incompetent, like we haven’t understood the information the first time through. Asking for clarification can be seen as admitting that we weren’t sharp enough to grasp things the first time round or, that we think the speaker did not make themselves clear.

And so it is easy to go down the wrong road, to get on with our work without fully committing to it, to misinterpret information or someone’s feelings. It’s not always easy, but asking for clarification will save a  lot of time in the same way as giving space to others to seek clarification from yourself, can help to strengthen relationships with your team.

Embracing Emotions

 Book, Wellbeing  No Responses »
Jul 072011
 

I’m currently reading “Difficult Conversations” by members of the Harvard Negotiation Project. I have only just started reading it and one of its main messages has already stuck in my mind. Emotions are involved in difficult conversations. In fact, emotions are involved in many conversations. Whether we choose to express them or not (and how we choose to express them if we do) is a different matter.

Emotions in the workplace are a tricky subject. We are supposed not to get “emotional”, not to let “the emotions get in the way of our reasoning” and, my personal favourite wishy-washy-what-on-Earth-do-you-mean-by-that: “keep it professional”. The problem is that the “professional” is embodied by a person, with a past, with feelings and with expectations. Therefore, it is very difficult to keep emotions out of work.

Once we admit that we all have emotions and that we are (or should) be allowed to feel, we can be less hard on ourselves for not always knowing how to react in a difficult situation. In “Difficult Conversations” this is addressed under “The Identity Conversation”, that added layer that makes difficult conversations even more difficult, as we worry what our involvement is saying about us.

I’m looking forward to reading “Difficult Conversations”. It’s always interesting to stop and think about why we shy away from certain types of communication and to begin to think about what we can do to make our life with others just that little bit more productive…

Changing how you deal with difficult conversations takes work. But better the ache of muscles growing from an unaccustomed workout than the sting of wounds from an unnecessary fight.

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